Wilson describes what happened in his own words:
"At this point, the pit boss unexpectedly sent a mechanic in to test the wheel. First, he laid a carpenter's level across the rim. The bubble didn't show a true horizontal, so he cranked up the feet of the table until he was better satisfied. Actually, we didn't care a hoot about that because we didn't believe that a slight tilt could affect the success of any number very much. But then he began feeling the metal slots between the numbers. When he came to [our hot] number 3, he got very excited and went running off to tell his boss.
"Meanwhile, we commenced playing at $4 per spin instead of the quarters we had played previously. . . We played for about an hour with the new stakes, rocking up and down, when suddenly the owner himself appeared on the scene. He stopped the action immediately. Then he picked up the ivory ball and conducted his own little test on the wheel. He held the ball against the metal slots, spun the wheel very fast, and listened to the noise that the ball made upon the slots as it went around, ‘Klunk-klunkklunk-ping–klunk-klunk-klunk-ping.’ That was enough for him, and he growled that the mechanic who was responsible for that wheel should be fired. He ordered a new wheel!
"Everybody was stunned, for this was the first time in the history of Harold's Club that the management had ever changed a wheel on any roulette player. It was supposed to be the biggest and most generous club in Nevada. . . Everyone was astonished: the players, the spectators, the dealers, and even the pit bosses. We were utterly crushed, of course, for all our data-taking became useless."
Because of the casino's tactics, Wilson and Bowers won only about $125 on the biased wheel in twenty four hours of straight play!
These young men spent a considerable amount of time and energy to come away with very meager winnings. Just how realistic is wheel clocking for the average player? Is there a way to benefit from this knowledge without undergoing the ordeal of Wilson and Bowers? Surprisingly, there is different approach relying on normally occurring variations in the results of roulette spins which will give you a greater advantage than wheel tracking and is much easier to use.
After the sample has been made, you will look for a number with a statistically significant number of occurrences. Based on sound theories propagated by the Belgian gambler and mathematician Pierre Basieux (Roulette, Die Zahmung des Zufalls, Munich, 1992), the expected frequency of a number, if it is truly random, in 800 spins is 33. If the number occurs more than 33 times, the roulette wheel may be biased. The higher the number of occurrences, the greater the potential bias.
(4.3 / 5)
(4.2 / 5)
